of him--Eppy something or other--and read the whole time. Our
four-course shilling table d'hote with Eppy, he would say, was a banquet
fit for a prince; without Eppy he was of opinion that a policeman
wouldn't touch it. But he was one of those men that report things for
the newspapers, and was given to exaggeration.

"A coffee-shop becomes a bit of a desert towards three o'clock; and,
after a while, young Tidelman, for that was his name, got to putting down
his book and chatting to me. His father was dead; which, judging from
what he told me about the old man, must have been a bit of luck for
everybody; and his mother, it turned out, had come from my own village in
Suffolk; and that constituted a sort of bond between us, seeing I had
known all her people pretty intimately. He was earning good money at a
dairy, where his work was scouring milk-cans; and his Christian
name--which was the only thing Christian about him, and that, somehow or
another, didn't seem to fit him--was Joseph.

"One afternoon he came into the shop looking as if he had lost a shilling
and found sixpence, as the saying is; and instead of drinking water as
usual, sent the girl out for a pint of ale. The moment it came he drank
off half of it at a gulp, and then sat staring out of the window.

"'What's up?' I says. 'Got the shove?'

"'Yes,' he answers; 'but, as it happens, it's a shove up. I've been
taken off the yard and put on the walk, with a rise of two bob a week.'
Then he took another pull at the beer and looked more savage than ever.

"'Well,' I says, 'that ain't the sort of thing to be humpy about.'